


Knight Magic 2: Wandless Magic

by suitesamba



Series: Knight Magic [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Humor, M/M, Magic, Potterlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:31:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock applies scientific experimentation to magic and surprises John with a new  trick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knight Magic 2: Wandless Magic

**Author's Note:**

> An extra chapter, vignette-style, to my completed work "Knight Magic." I'm planning more of these, with the next one on useful spells to use in bed.

Magic had come back into the lives of the occupants of 221B Baker Street months ago, and all had been well while they were both busy. But Sherlock wasn’t busy now, and John was, and this worried John.

As well it should..

Sherlock obeyed the rules they’d set for themselves– mostly. They freely performed what they termed minor magic. Magic for household and personal conveniences. Lumos and Nox and Accio and Scourgify and Reparo and a host of other spells to make sure the doors were locked, the lights off, and to summon a blanket when the evening was chilly and they were sprawled together on the sofa. Other rules, too. Never use a wand against another person unless someone was in extreme danger. Never ever disobey the statute of secrecy – unless, of course, someone was in extreme danger and there was no other viable way of saving them. Never (ever) use a wand against the other. Never leave your wand out. That was one of the best rules, really. It meant that most of the time, their wands were tucked away in dresser or desk drawers, and it required a deliberate, concerted effort to get up and fetch them.

Well, it did until Sherlock learned wandless magic.

It shouldn’t have surprised John, really. Sherlock was brilliant at most everything he did, outside of basic, human, interpersonal relationships, anyway. And he could design and set up the parameters of an experiment in his sleep. So, while John was busy with a month-long, fill-in stint at a surgery, a job that required an hour-long commute on the tube on each end, Sherlock was between cases, bored, and experimenting. With magic.

There was so much he didn’t know, that John’s books couldn’t begin to tell him, and Mycroft was getting positively snotty about his requests for non-specific books about specific topics. What influenced the strength or accuracy of a spell? His mood? Sleepiness? Distraction? How much he really _wanted_ it? Did concentrating make it more powerful? Standing versus sitting versus lying in bed? Did enunciating the words very clearly have any discernible effect as opposed to mumbling them? If he was trying to summon an object, was the spell more successful if he could see the item? Couldn’t see it but knew where it was? Knew it was somewhere in the flat but had no idea precisely where? What happened when you summoned something locked away in a drawer? Or tucked into the back of the cupboard?

And did he actually have to be holding his wand? What if he were gripping it loosely? Lying on the sofa with his hand covering it but not gripping it? Touching it with one finger? Not touching it with his hand at all, but letting it lie against his thigh or rest on his stomach?

He spent three exhausting days collecting data, several hours analyzing it, and two more days perfecting a wandless Accio, clearly the most useful of all the spells he had re-learned so far. It was all-around-useful convenient, and John had learned to look both ways when walking past a doorway after getting hit in the bollocks with one of Sherlock’s shoes when they were getting ready to go out one evening.

So, when John walked into the flat one Friday evening, deliriously happy that his work week was finally over, Sherlock, looking far more chipper than anyone should look at this time on a Friday evening – especially Sherlock Holmes – casually asked if John would like a beer.

John looked at him suspiciously. Sherlock was sprawled over his chair, feet dangling over the side, knees over the arm. He looked exceedingly comfortable. He didn’t look at all predisposed to jump up and get anything for John. 

“Are you offering to fetch one for me?” John asked as he shrugged out of his coat and threw it over the back of his chair.

Sherlock very casually pointed one finger in the general direction of the kitchen. The finger pointing was completely unnecessary but he rather liked the effect.

“Accio John’s beer,” he said. He had to say it rather authoritatively for the spell to work without his wand in hand. Definitely a disappointment – he’d hoped to make the whole thing look as casual as the finger pointing.

And wonder of wonders, a bottle of John’s favorite beer, which had been sitting on the kitchen counter waiting as Sherlock hadn’t yet mastered a wandless “Alohomora” to open the fridge from this distance, shot into the room, a veritable blur of motion.

Unfortunately, Sherlock made a serious tactical error. He’d summoned the beer for John, after all. He had no intention of drinking it himself. But he’d forgotten that he’d done the summoning, so the beer would come to him, and not to John.

He was looking at John, gauging his reaction (complete and utter shock, mouth open in surprise, eyes full of that alarming look he had when something awful was about to happen), when the bottle whacked him on the side of the head and fell onto the floor, shattering and spewing beer in all directions.

In previous trials, Sherlock had had his hand out in front of himself, ready to expertly pluck the beer bottle out of the air. He’d practiced enough times to be very good at the spell, and for the beer bottle to attain a respectable speed, hitting his hand with a hard slap that sounded impressive and left his palm stinging.

The unexpected blow to the side of his head nearly knocked him out. It certainly made him see stars, yell out an appropriate expletive, and cradle his head with both hands. 

He ignored the broken bottle in favor of containing his panic over the blood.

John was there in a heartbeat, kneeling at his feet, trying to pry his hand off his head.

“God damn it Sherlock, you’re going to need stitches.” He sounded resigned, and quite a bit more amused than the situation warranted.

The bottle had, in fact, left a respectable gash in the side of Sherlock’s head, a gash that required eight stitches and the shaving away of a good deal of the hair around his ear. It made him look ridiculous, and he argued against the stitches even as he cringed as John examined him.

“Don’t tell me that wizards use stitches – I know they don’t. Just use your wand, John. Seal it all up and – ow!”

John wisely refused. Like a child, Sherlock needed to learn consequences. And magic, unfortunately, ameliorated consequences. Cut off your finger playing with a machete? No problem – grow a new one.

An hour later, Sherlock was shaved, stitched and stretched out on the sofa with an ice pack over the swollen lump on the side of his head. 

And John was sitting on the coffee table, looking serious.

“You realize,” he said, reaching out to adjust the ice pack and making Sherlock flinch, “that you just performed wandless magic and nearly killed yourself?”

“I hardly nearly _killed_ myself,” corrected Sherlock. “And I’d done it a dozen times today already before you came home. You’re clearly a distraction.”

“What distracted you was trying to impress me,” John corrected. 

“And surprise you. Did I?” asked Sherlock. He opened one eye and peered at John hopefully.

“Surprise me? Hmm. Startled me, yes. I didn’t have a lot of time to think before the blood started spurting.” 

“So I impressed you with the blood, then,” said Sherlock. He groaned again, then focused on John. “Pain potion?” he asked hopefully.

John sighed. “Maybe tonight – before bed. To help you sleep.”

“I could sleep now.”

John poked Sherlock in the ribs. “No. Now you’re going to explain to me how you learned wandless magic on your own in the space of a week.”

Sherlock grabbed John’s finger as it poked him again and drew John’s hand down into his own. 

“Scientific experimentation, John,” he explained. “Start with a hypothesis, devise a series of tests, record the results, interpret them and revise the hypothesis as indicated. You see me do this all the time.”

John considered this, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again.

“Budge over.”

“Hurts,” muttered Sherlock, but John wedged himself in front of him nonetheless, and they lay there, side by side, while John formulated his thoughts.

“You realize what you’re doing, don’t you?” he asked after a bit.

“Lying here in pain because you refused to heal me magically or at the very least give me a class three pain potion?” asked Sherlock. John was well aware that class three pain potions were Sherlock’s favorite thing about being a wizard, other than disrupting the CCTV cameras.

“Yes, that.” He pushed back into Sherlock, wiggled to get more comfortable. “But also, you’re using science to learn more about magic. You’re not trying to reconcile magic and science, but using scientific process to test magic.”

Sherlock’s grip around his waist tightened. His chin dug into John’s shoulder. When he spoke, he sounded sleepy and disinterested. “That’s good – right?”

“Yeah, that’s good,” answered John. “I think we can both live with that.”

“Hmm. Good.” Sherlock yawned sleepily.

“Sherlock?” asked John, several minutes later.

“Hmmm?”

“I’m sorry you’re hurt, but that was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

And he was laughing, then, shaking the sofa, and Sherlock poked him in the ribs, and John stopped laughing, speaking only one more time before he fell asleep.

“I’ve always loved magic,” he whispered, “but it wasn’t nearly as fun without you.”

_Fin_


End file.
